Leon van der Veen

As a kid I always had a passion for music. I played piano and for my 13th birthday I got music producing software (Steinberg Cubase VST 3) from my parents. I always thought I would become a DJ or producer.

However, around the age of 15 I became interested into how computers work. I started writing my first simple scripts and simple websites. Even though both my father and my grandfather were programmers – yes, I'm a third generation Software Engineer! – I didn't talk a lot about computers or programming with them. But I do think they had their influence on my passion for programming. I quickly spend less time on music and more time with computers (but I never completely stopped with music).

Around the end of High school I started to do my first official freelance jobs making websites for family and acquaintances. After high school I naturally started studying Computer Science at Radboud University in my home town Nijmegen. A few years later during my studies I started to work for the startup Deskbookers. I quickly started to work full-time and dropped out of university. But nine months later I decided to continue studying at the HAN University of Applied Sciences next to my job. I successfully managed to balance my time between both. But in the beginning of 2015 Deskbookers got an opportunity: we got selected for the startup accelerator program Rockstart in Amsterdam. As a company (at the time just 4 people) we decided this opportunity was big enough to leave our lives in Nijmegen behind. For me this meant that I had to drop out again! And so I did, we all moved to Amsterdam. I don't regret this decision. I've learned a lot. I saw how Deskbookers grew really fast, worked with a great team, learned how to manage a team and saw the company scale down again.

At Deskbookers I've grown into a full-stack developer and I developed Scrum Master / team lead skills. At the end of 2018 I switched my job. I started to work for bloomon, a scale up in the flower industry. Here I got the chance to further develop my management skills. Sadly the company went through a reorganisation and the tech team got a lot smaller. However, this gave me the chance to further develop my role as Squad Lead / Senior developer.

In the fall of 2019 I started a new job as Senior Backend Engineer at Dott. Dott is a micromobility start-up with a vision, of inner cities without cars and polution. An ambitious goal. What drew me to Dott was the vision and the team. The quality of the product and the team is high and inspire me to become a better developer.

After more than 3 years it was time to leave Dott and start a new adventure. A former classmate had started his own startup Codean in the cybersecurity sector. I joined Codean in July 2022 as Lead Developer. At Codean I was pretty much involved in everything, from the backend (in Python) to the frontend (in Vue3).

I have a good eye for details, thinking of edge cases and make sure that the total platform works well. This includes making sure that all the parts of the system build by several different developers work well together and are future proof.